


Words of Mercury, songs of Apollo

by Lilliburlero



Category: Henry V - Shakespeare
Genre: Aging, Bisexuality, Class Differences, Disability, F/M, Hearing the Chimes at Midnight, M/M, Minor Character Death, Period Typical Attitudes, Polyamory, Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-11
Updated: 2017-02-11
Packaged: 2018-09-23 15:12:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9663011
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: Fluellen and Gower celebrate the coronation of a new King.*Note: period-typical attitudes and language in regard to gender, sexuality, disability and race.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AellaIrene](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AellaIrene/gifts).



> Any resemblance to historical accuracy or Shakespeare is purely accidental.

Gruffydd ap Llewelyn said, softly and with an uncharacteristic air of discomfiture, ‘I just don’t see there’s anything much _to_ celebrate. _Vae tibi terra cuius rex est puer_ —’

‘Woe to—’ Sir Hugh began, exegetically. His father slapped the arm of the settle with a noise like quarterstaves meeting in combat. 

‘I know what it means, lad. He’s been saying it for seven years, on and off.’ Tom Gower looked, sidelong and apologetic, at his old, dear friend. ‘Living it too, which is more than you or I have. But—’ 

‘Yes. At least you know what it’s like,’ said the young priest primly. 

‘Ah, come on—I didn’t mean—’ 

Reflecting that actually he _did_ mean, not that he wasn’t proud of Hugh’s learning and vocation, not that he wasn’t glad that his eldest son served the Prince of Peace and was overwhelmingly unlikely to die of the shits in a French field, a fate from which even kings were not properly exempt, but just that a civilian _couldn’t_ know, not _really_ , Tom spluttered to a halt. 

‘Well, that is all finished, concluded and done with now,’ Gruffydd said. 

‘Then let’s celebrate that. You’re—’ he realised just in time that _home_ , though accurate, was not a tactful word, ‘—back, safe and s—’ he saw that Hugh was also averting his eyes from the crutch leaning against the settle, and Gruffydd, with the disconcerting irony that is one of the cripple’s few privileges, was looking at it. Tom picked up his mug of ale. ‘Look, Griff, if it helps, don’t think of it as a Coronation party. Think of it as a supply and logistics problem.’ 

Gruffydd rocked with either mirth or pain, it was difficult to tell sometimes. ‘Christ’s foreskin, Tom,’ he wheezed, ‘you are most extraordinary inspired in oratory this morning, look you; you should have rallied the troops upon Crispin Crispianus.’ 

‘Fuck off and fuck a stolen sheep, Taff.’ 

Hugh, looking reproachful mostly for form’s sake, drained his cup and rose. ‘Thanks for breakfast, Dad. I’m sure the parish will be thrilled, whatever you put on. Don’t get up, coz—’ he added to Gruffydd, who was moving for his crutch. 

‘Father,’ said Tom perfunctorily, staying very distinctly put. 

Hugh sketched a blessing. ‘My child.’ 

Oratorical or not, it seemed to nudge Gruffydd out of his gloom. The household was used to his idiosyncratic ideas concerning the apportioning and proper conduct of work; the village, in which he had spent relatively little time between campaigns, less so. He tormented Betty Brewster upon the matter of _hops_ , without which (he said) ale was but a sad, sour mash, and discoursed to her upon the legislation enacted in regard of hopped ale by such advanced cities as Bremen and Hamburg. At length she chased him from her house, saying she was no Dutch witch to throw physic and nostrums in her ale, and if he wanted hops so badly he might plant Master Gower’s gardens with the nasty bitter things. To which he replied that was certainly a notion of sorts, the local climate would be most benevolent to hops, and then perhaps she would be a Kentish witch and brew _beor_ with them, whereupon her daughter stepped in to restrain her before she crowned the mad Welshman with a kettle, averring she would live and die a Witch of Kent. 

To John Tanner Gruffydd vouchsafed seven different methods of making indigo known to the Bolognese, the only way to dye a kidskin true, deep, unreflecting black, and the recipe for chamois leather, receiving in response an invitation to bathe his face in the shitheap in the yard. As rebuffs went, it proved markedly ineffective, prompting a prolonged reflection upon the eighteenth canto of the inspired Florentine’s vision of Hell. Goody Tanner’s sortie with a broom and certain racially-insensitive epithets, however, effected complete rout. 

Returning to the hallhouse, Gruffydd invaded the solar and quizzed the assembled gossips over their work. 

‘Uncle Gruffydd can actually sew. It’s _bizarre_. Go on, Avice, give him that panel.’ 

‘Cecily—’ Mistress Gower warned. 

‘Mama, it’s only in fun. She can unpick it, and anyway, it could hardly be wor—’ 

‘I cannot, _actually_ , sew, Mistress Avice,’ Gruffydd said, declining her forlorn proffer of a strip of linen with a grave smile that brought a blush to her long, hollow cheek. ‘I can only darn and mend. It is a useful facility in a soldier. A camp will always attract—seamstresses, of course, but your cloak is torn away from camp, and then where are you? And I confess,’ he said, turning a black, glittering eye upon the room, ‘I do not see what it is that is so very feminine about pricking a small, tight hole with a hard implement that it is shame for a man even to attempt it, look you.’ 

Amid general mirth, perhaps no-one noticed Mistress Gower fumbling, with slightly emphatic deliberation, in the basket of silks and wools at her feet. 

* 

That night in bed, when they had both slept a little, wearing off the immediate fatigue of the day, Nan said to her husband, ‘We must give him something to do. A proper job. He’s a menace.’ 

Tom reached absently to squeeze her haunch, grunting with satisfaction at its warm abundance. ‘Well, love, you’re the expert. At keeping him in, er, check.’ 

She punched his chest with a compact, playful fist. ‘That’s different, and you know it. You—you didn’t want him—to—tonight, did you?’ 

‘No—you know I always say. And I wouldn’t ever, unless you agreed. You’re my wife.’ 

‘I know. But he needs just you sometimes.’ 

‘So do you, sweeting—I mean, I do—oh, you know what I mean—’ He let the hand on her buttock become rhythmic and investigative, pushing up her shift about her hips, and leaned down to kiss her, missing his target in the dark and bringing his lips to rest on her nose. 

She giggled. ‘You’re hopeless at short range, Captain Gower.’ 

‘Oh, am I, Mistress Nan?’ he said, pulling her on top of him. ‘We’ll see about that.’ Her inner thigh, slack and soft, brushed his prick, leaving it rather more than half-hard. He slipped one hand under the shift to fondle her stomach and breasts, the skin pouched, dimpled and ridged by seven pregnancies. He feared an eighth, that it would overtire her, though she was strong and energetic still, that something would go wrong, which he understood was likelier after a woman’s fortieth year, that the child would be born dead or die soon after, as had three brothers before it. And yet it excited him, as much as it had when he was eighteen and newly, hastily wed, to see her big with child, his child; he found it difficult to behave honourably and keep his hands off her then. 

She reached behind to touch his cock; he drew his hand down her belly and pressed his thumb into the dense curls between her legs. She was drier than his vanity might have hoped; he took her hand gently from his prick and wriggled down the bed beneath her. His mind had a tendency to wander in the performance of this act, often to places that left him feeling guilty; as he lapped and circled his tongue, half-pleasurably half-suffocated, they took their accustomed meandering course; when at length she tugged at his shoulders with a hoarse, obscene invitation, he wasn’t really thinking of her at all. 

It didn’t matter, he supposed. When she leaned down hard on him and rode him to her throaty, gurgling contentment, making his own upward thrusts seem supernumerary (though she always said not, often adding the compliment on his size that he could have sworn he wasn’t fishing for), when her long plait escaped from its coif and whipped his cheek, when he felt swollen to the point of explosion, like a bladder blown up for a football, the world beyond the bed-curtains might as well not have existed. He let himself go as she sank onto his chest: he might regret that, in a week or two, as she waited anxiously for her courses, but the other way was an additional peril to his soul, and he could do with keeping those to a minimum, considering. 

She rolled off him with a rather perfunctory kiss, adjusted her shift, turned over and backed up against his side. He put his arm around her, cupping her left breast, which he had first done when the King’s grandfather had not long settled his insecure arse on the throne. It had not even half filled his hand then, a maiden’s firm, high bud, well, _not_ a maiden’s, which was the occasion for some frankly ridiculous pride on his part, and their bed had been a hayloft with cattle snorting and steaming beneath. And one hell of a flap to face four months later, when she quickened, with her crowd threatening a suit for seduction, and his insisting that he was the dupe of a conniving hussy who had seen him and the forty good acres that he stood to inherit from his childless uncle coming from seven leagues off. 

Looking back on it, both families were as much right as they were wrong: he hadn’t as much as exchanged a word with Peter Sackett’s pretty ward before he determined to take her to bed, by which he supposed he meant to wife as well, the two things being more or less synonymous for a good-natured, honourable youth of his station; she wanted above all to get quit of her guardian’s overcrowded, cacophanous, unthrifty household. His lot were having none of it, and so Nan and he set about to present them with the time-honoured _fait accompli_. The baby had lived two days. Tom never saw him: he was in the west country, fighting for the King at Shrewsbury. Hugh was the result of his return from that campaign; their next child, conceived in the secure glow of Tom’s coming into his inheritance, was named for his father and lived for five months. Nan’s grief, and Tom’s inability truly to understand it, brought a bitter estrangement. That period also contained a disreputable and dangerous association with a knight’s lady, conducted on his dilatory way back from Bramham Moor. He was as certain as any man can be about such things that he’d left a cuckoo in a Yorkshire nest, but there was nothing to be done about that then or now. The child, if it had lived, would be a young man or woman of twenty. He could even be a grandfather to real, armigerous gentry. 

Eventual reconciliation with Nan produced Cecily, whose twin brother was born dead. She thrived, though, a big, assertive girl, as her older brother, short though physically robust, was retiring and sensitive. Hugh’s subsequent hard-faced determination to get on in the Church rather astonished everybody, except his sister, who had been saying to anyone who would listen and since they were both small that Hugh was the ruthless one, except no-one did listen to little girls, little girls who were large and noisy especially. 

The old King—that was, the old old King—died, his son sought to recoup lost honour and land in France, and green with seasickness on the deck of a carrack, Tom had (literally) bumped into a Welshman, voluble even by the standard, who lent him a cloak and found him a place to lie down. Friendship came quickly out of that; the other thing, that Tom didn’t quite know or dare to acknowledge about himself, came slow. He thought love generally followed upon the desire to swive, as it had with Nan, or did not, as it had not though he had tried to convince himself it had, with Lady Elizabeth. This was the other way about. 

When his loyal affection for Gruffydd turned ardent, and he could (after the third time) no longer reasonably attribute it to either wine or the delirium of an impossible victory, he became confused, and but for Gruffydd’s uncanny ability to see a man’s next move before he himself quite thought of making it, Tom’s confusion would have issued in violence. It didn’t help that his instinctive reaction to Gruffydd’s vigour was submission, but gradually he came to accept that, to take pride in just how much he could absorb, which was a very great deal, Welshmen deserving their reputation in that regard. 

Nonetheless, he maintained a curious conviction that his physical attachment to Gruffydd could not survive the grim roiling of the journey back across the Channel, that it would all be puked out of him over the side of the horrible, smelly balinger that brought them home. That belief proved remarkably unsound; he understood quickly that Nan both perceived the nature of their particular friendship and sanctioned it, more gradually that she rather fancied Gruffydd herself (what _was_ it about Welshmen?) 

Before it got sorted out properly, they had been to France and back again once more. But it did get sorted out, after a fashion. Though Gruffydd’s lusts inclined to women not at all, he was quite amenable to being ordered about and chastised by them, and that answered very nicely. Tom knew that what they did was mortal sin, and that Gruffydd, whose eye for a sympathetic confessor was as unerring as it was for the right angle and depth of a mine, received periodic absolution for it. He supposed that Nan, meanwhile, could answer the standard confessional questions without either dishonesty or incrimination of those she loved. And he—well, he had taken to making his confessions direct to God, which was Lollardy, and would shock Gruffydd to death if he ever admitted it, so he didn’t. Tom was not at all sure that, on every point that mattered, he was not in fact a Lollard. Most of it seemed good sense to him: Scripture in a language you could understand, the bread and wine of the Mass as symbols of Our Lord’s body and not the thing itself, a stop to rich men racing through Purgatory with the aid of pilgrimages and indulgences and chantries. And it would explain his disquiet at the path Hugh had taken—the pursuit of temporal power through clerical office, it was wrong, he was sure of it. 

Nan shifted and mumbled; he released her, and flopped onto his other side. He needed a piss, and until he dealt with that he wasn’t going to get any kip; it was nonetheless a struggle to persuade himself out of the warm black frowst of the bed into the cold fluttering light thrown by a small lantern on the corner shelf and use the pot. He was getting old, fat and soft. As he got back into bed the gamey smell of a good fuck hit him with renewed force, and he grinned, half-wanting to wake Nan and do it again. Except she wouldn’t like that, it put her straight to sleep and she was always foul-tempered and fouler-mouthed if disturbed, and he probably couldn’t anyway, because he was forty-six and it took a lot longer than it used to recover. He’d have those odd cramps in his stomach in the morning, as if getting a cockstand tore a sinew, or something. Maybe it did. He really should get just a few hours shut-eye, otherwise he’d be a wreck tomorrow. But now he’d started he couldn’t stop reviewing it all, the life that had got him where he was now. 

At King Henry’s death, Tom took his pension, relinquishing command of his small unit to the reeve of one of Sir Thomas Erpingham's estates, but Gruffydd, who said that men of his mould were made to fight, it was obvious, when you once reflected upon it, if they were not to be priests they must be soldiers (Tom thought that Gruffydd would have made a good priest, one that Our Lord wouldn’t be ashamed to own as a friend, unlike most of them) still went to the wars against the Dauphin. 

And so Tom learned a fair deal about civilian anxiety, which had a very different texture from the military sort, as he pursued (with considerable success, for his wife, though she had made early mistakes attributable to youth and the pressures of motherhood, had grown into a fine manager of land and livestock, crops and orchards, money and men, laying down good groundwork in his absences) the inglorious arts of peace. In the second year of the infant King’s reign Nan gave birth to a daughter, named Anne for her, and then the twins, Griffith and Katharine, they would be three years old with the new year. The boy’s name, though Anglicised (there were _limits_ ) had been chosen in defiance of a slander that had not quite died down, for it was in vain to point out that both children markedly resembled Tom, though with their mother’s dark colouring, that twins ran in the family, Cissy was one after all, and it was an old wives’ tale _anyway_ , so the chatterers might as well be given their field day. 

The ill-luck that had eluded Gruffydd for nearly forty years caught up with him at Orléans: a loose pit-prop fell, breaking his leg in several places, as he led the mining of a section of the Boulevart. Tom, passionately abandoning native scepticism, firmly attributed this mischance to the witchcraft of La Pucelle, and all Gruffydd’s protestations that he was patched up and in Calais before that malapert was ever heard of cut not the thickest of Tewkesbury mustard with him: only the machinations of Satan could sufficiently account for Gruffydd ap Llewelyn, even a fifty-three-year-old Gruffydd ap Llewelyn whose strength and sight had gone into irrevocable and unmistakable decline, failing to perceive and evade immediate hazard to his person. 

Gruffydd had taken it hard. The army was what he was, his whole self, and not to be among the five thousand who were to go into France with the boy King, sailing on the recommissioned _Holigost_ and _Grace Dieu_ , was shame almost beyond bearing. He sat by the fire day after day unmoving, and night after night unsleeping, until Tom carried him into his bed and sat with him until at last he slept, which he did for nearly two days together, and when he woke he started to speak and eat and irritate people again. But he was reluctant to take off his hosen and show his twisted leg even in the friendliest of company. Tom hadn’t seen the full extent of the damage: he wished he could, he could help, he had good hands for that sort of thing, inherited from the maternal grandfather who was a farrier. It hurt him to see Gruffydd, whose personal codes of discipline and penance contained something of a sensualist, ashamed of his body. If Gruffydd would only take a bath with him; he used to love bathing. But the only place for Tom’s (capacious, it would hold three, though it usually didn’t) bathtub was in front of the great fire in the hall, which might as well be in the Market Square in Canterbury. He remembered visits he and Gruffydd had made to certain fairly libertine (though strictly-run) houses in Southwark: it was in one of those that Gruffydd had first let Tom bugger him, a liberty permitted only at rare intervals since, for Gruffydd had strong feelings about what he called the _pathic part_ , quite unrelated to his evident enjoyment of it. It was all part of the laws of war for him, some mysterious private appendix to Caesar, Livy and Sallust. 

Tom’s prick twitched and stiffened to the memory; he spat into his hand and stroked it. God’s teeth, he wanted that again, to part Gruffydd’s arse-cheeks and rub his oiled cock along the hairy crack, to tease Gruffydd’s hole with his prick-tip until he swore, and prayed, and pleaded, whereupon Tom would refuse him, tease him a little more, reaching around to tug his cock, order him to swear and pray and plead in another language, because Gruffydd could say, _for Jesu’s sake, please fuck me, fuck me hard, fuck me now_ in an astonishing variety of tongues, testament to the fairly extensive experience with farm-boys and apprentices (and the occasional knight and baronet) that made Tom angry and jealous and aroused at once. He wanted to savour each inch of that initial, slow, exquisitely constrained penetration, for once he started to thrust Gruffydd would relax and loosen, and while that had its compensations, nothing quite compared to that sensation of possession, power, dominance (and yes, dominance, possession and power over a gentleman born, what price a coat of arms when you had a yeoman archer’s big prick shoved up your arse because you’d begged a yeoman archer, in two or three of the languages of Christendom, to shove his big prick up your arse) it was like fighting, except there was a blow that you could land that would make a man collapse with pleasure and not with pain, and if the fucking pigheaded stiffnecked Welsh bugger would would only let him fucking well practise fucking once in a buggery fucking while he could fucking land it with a bit more fucking regularity than he fucking did fuck fuck fuck— 

Tom came, grinding his teeth to stop himself crying out. Nan stirred and he felt her posture change from a slumberous to a half-wakeful one. 

‘You ‘sleep, Tom?’ 

‘Yes. Sorry. You get back off, sweeting.’ He wiped himself surreptitiously on the sheet, feeling like a base, low-lived cur. But before he could finish saying a paternoster he was dreaming. 

* 

Gruffydd twisted from his reading-desk, laying down a stylus as Tom entered the small chamber. His smile was warm, but touched by melancholy, an effect heightened by the chill sun of a winter afternoon. Tom nodded at the desk. 

‘It looks well. How’s it working out for you?’ 

‘Very good. The boy Adam was most meticulous in the cutting down and the adjustments. It is a better fit now than when it was for standing at. That is a good boy.’ 

Tom laid his hand on the back of Gruffydd’s neck, looking down at the wax tablet on the desk. It was covered with lines and lozenge-shaped notches, as if a scalded cat had danced upon it. 

‘What’s that?’ 

‘Mistress Gower has appointed me Master of Revels. She thinks I am a sturdy beggar, that simply wants employment.’ 

‘So you are.’ 

‘That ticklish caressing and paddling in my nape is very agreeable, Tom. I beg you cease it.’ 

‘Why? Oh, _Friday_. You’re a queer fish, being so particular about the days you do your sinning on. And Friday is conveniently situated next door to Saturday, when, if I’m not mistaken, you ride to Pett Bottom and avail of the services of your pretty parson, to,’ he waved his free hand over the tablet, ‘scrape the slate.’ 

Under Tom’s touch, which had turned errant and voluptuous, Gruffydd’s grumble became a purr. He pursed his lips and flared his nostrils in an attempt to look aggrieved. ‘The contiguity of the days is not pertinent, look you, and nor are Sir Jocelyn’s undoubted—charms—’ He wriggled ineffectually on the joint-stool. ‘—Though the last time there were blackheads sprouting in the wings of his nose, he should steam his head—Tom—Tom, I forbid you absolutely essay the laces of my shirt, see—’ 

‘Too late—’ The knot yielded, and Tom slipped his hand inside, quickly finding the tender nipple in its scrub of rough curls. 

‘It is a matter of dis—discipline—Thomas Gower! Stop it, or I shall be in a moment bidding you kiss me, oh Jesu, kiss me, kiss me.’ 

Tom leaned over and pecked his upturned lips, then leapt back out of his reach, laughing. ‘No, you’re right. A Christian should eat no meat of a Friday.’ 

Gruffydd planted his hands on his thighs, parting the skirts of his doublet to reveal an excitement more than incipient, and let his head droop with a groan. ‘You bastard son of a whoreson—I will take you a buttonhole lower, Gower, by my honour and my faith—’ His head whipped to one side, fixing Tom with the sort of giddy, battle-hungry look that he hadn’t seen since he came back from France. ‘I dreamt of you last night.’ He took a shallow breath and swallowed. ‘And when I woke—what woke me, in fact—just as if I were a boy once more, with a creaking voice and down on my lip.’ 

‘See? All this restraint is bad for you. As a matter of fact, I dreamed—well, I thought about you last night too. The sort of thinking you do with one hand.’ 

Gruffydd was gratified by that, Tom could see, but he demurely rearranged his doublet over the evidence. 

‘I’d like to be more than thinking again pretty soon, Griff. If you would too.’ 

‘I would. I just don’t know if I can. I fear letting you down. An impotent, lame old man.’ 

‘ _Don’t_. You won’t. I—’ It was easier to kiss, neither passionately nor playfully this time, than to say _I love you_ , so Tom bent awkwardly to do that. He felt a shit for having played the pricktease, but he knew from experience that had he not, Gruffydd would probably have recoiled more violently and more upsettingly for both of them. 

‘From your perspective, no. But from mine.’ 

‘You’re a prodigal piece of work and no mistake. Here, show me your scratchings. What has Nan got you labouring at?’ 

‘Ah. This,’ he picked up the stylus and tapped the tablet. ‘This is by way of being a by-blow to the legitimate issue of Mistress Gower’s orders. It is an anthem for the Coronation and the King’s going into France—’ 

‘You wrote it?’ 

‘Naturally I wrote it. Not the words, of course, which are King Solomon’s, but the music. It is a very easy antiphon to learn. I composed it with the capacities of Englishmen in mind.’ 

‘Hmph. Wasn't warbling in parts won us France.' 

'Nor an Englishman.' 

Tom's smile was tight: Gruffydd remembered the King's father a sight too sentimentally, to his mind, forgetting his cruel freaks and mirthless mischief in a haze of nostalgia and hagiography. Gruffydd had been in love with him, that was the truth of it, and had the tricksy, villainous yellow-brown eye but fallen on him, or the hanging nether lip but opened, he would have given himself in delight as well as duty. Perhaps it even had—Christ's bones, Tom thought, not just jealousy of a king but of a dead king, he should get a grip. 

Gruffydd was talking. '—And so Timothy Tabor, Philip Fluter and the hurdy-gurdy man of the vale, who appears not to have a Christian appellation, are engaged for the dancing, but to my mind and Nan's also, there should be additionally some spectacle interim to the solemnities—that is, the mass and the procession and so forth—and the feasting and toping and games; this she charged me with staging, saying I had a free choice as to the matter, and there she spoke with the frankness that is commended by all authorities upon fin’amor, for your wife is the paragon of the world for honesty, look you—’ 

Tom locked an elbow around Gruffydd’s throat; his growl communicated less a desire to defend Nan’s chastity than surrender his own. Gruffydd leaned back and raised his chin, eyes closed; this time his thin, firm lips parted under Tom’s, and his mouth was as hot as if he’d just been drinking caudle. Tom broke away before he started thinking how it would feel around his cock. Well, not quite _before_. 

‘—But, to return to where we were before that very gratifying assault upon my powers of self-restraint, despite the admirable licence afforded me by my good hostess I find myself most lamentably constrained and fettered—’ 

Tom couldn’t resist. ‘You should be used to that by now.’ 

‘It is a trait I have observed among Englishmen that they think their wit impugned if they let a double construction once go past,’ Gruffydd reproved, ‘but true quickness of fancy is evidenced in a proper decorum, _omnia tempus habent et suis spatiis transeunt universa sub caelo_ , look you—’ 

‘All _right_ , what’s the problem?’ 

‘It is, as I was saying, that my design for the pageant, that is, the tableau, the play, is _hampered_ ,’ Gruffydd looked at him narrowly and sidelong, ‘by the sort, condition and attitude of the prospective mummers, whose fitness for the parts they play is determined _imprimis_ by their superfluity to general and necessary labour, and in the next place, by a propensity to egregious, if ingenuous, ostentation.’ 

‘You mean she wants you to keep the kids out from under everyone’s feet?’ 

‘And Widow Shamble, who is mad. Moreover, it is indecent, for women to personate—’ 

‘Mm, I’ve always wondered why that is—’ 

‘It is in the letters of St Paul,’ Gruffydd said definitely, which meant he didn’t know, because if he did he would quote chapter and verse in Latin. 

‘It’s just here in the hall, though. Not like up on a miracle wagon at the market cross.’ 

‘It is as the small end of the wedge, that will prise open the floodgates to all manner of debauchery—but it is well in a sense you should be so permissive, Tom, because little Annie is my other, ah—she-player. She wants to be a dragon.’ 

‘Like mother, like daughter.’ 

Gruffydd tutted. ‘That is not chivalrous. But yes; a certain definition of purpose descending from the distaff side. She will not be other than a dragon, in fact, and it is in vain I represent to her that there are no dragons among the Nine Worthies, of either sex, and instead she must enact Penthesilea.’ 

‘Quite frankly, I’m surprised she can even _say_ Penthesilea without watering half the county, at the moment.’ 

‘Yes, that too is an obstacle, or rather, the lack of one,’ Gruffydd agreed, indicating his own strong, yellow incisors. ‘But Semiramis would be worse, considering, especially since the chandler’s boy will defend his rights to the rôle with a ruthlessness worthy of the Assyrian queen herself—’ 

‘Rather you than me, mate.’ 

‘He’s very—convincing, given that he is the only member of the company whose voice is yet cracked. And without him we would have but two _Preuses_ , which would be neither practicable nor symmetrical, so _not_ to be smirking in that insinuating fashion—’ 

‘What, me?’ 

‘—and of the male Worthies we have a full complement of nine, though none above four foot high.’ 

‘Tell you what. You could do them in boyhood. What’s-his-name, strangling snakes in his cradle and all that—’ 

‘Hercules, who is not one of the Nine Worthies, as such—’ 

‘—and Alexander the Piglet, at his mother’s dug in a little sty on the Wye—’ 

At best, Gruffydd would limp for whatever length of life remained to him, but his upper limbs moved yet with their old instinct; his hand flashed out and seized Tom’s wrist in an implacable, terrifying grip. ‘By Jesu, I will make you pay, and pay you, you and your ridiculous vernacular, with its synonyms that are not synonyms, look you—’ 

As the sun set, all turning to shadow, they found synonyms for a great variety of endearments in their shared tongues, and well-used though agreeable means to stop mouths entirely. But Gruffydd refused still to bare his injured leg, and Tom began to wonder if his wish to see, touch, and solace it was a sort of morbid delectation, from which he should refrain. 

* 

About three-quarters of the parish was gathered around the trestle-tables in the hall, reeking of damp frieze and dogged jollity. The rain that fell on the procession from the church had been of the fine, penetrating sort that gets you wetter than big drops, but everyone was determined to be merry. And there was plenty of meat, bread and ale; wine for the top table. Sitting with his family (Hugh excepted, Hugh dined with the Prior of Christ Church that day), Tom wondered if the dais had been a mistake: he didn’t want to look as if he were playing lord of the manor. Nan sat in the other chair, on his right, little Griff in her lap and his sister at her foot, making a pillow out of the brach Blanche and a blanket of her mother’s skirts. Cecily occupied the first place on the bench to Tom's left. They would have to start putting a bit of thought into a husband for her, a prospect about which she seemed curiously complaisant, regarding no potential candidate with especial favour or interest. She seemed much to prefer being at the centre of a gaggle of girls than a circle of admiring young men, and yet he did not think her such a woman as Gruffydd was a man: she did not fall in love with her friends, she just bossed them about. Anne crouched on the edge of the dais, hugging a wooden shield painted with a dragon and mumbling her lines. Gruffydd was at the other end of the hall, gathering his troupe of miniature Worthies and shooing them behind the curtain rigged up to demarcate the stage; they periodically re-emerged, prodding each other with wooden swords and stealing one another’s headgear. Gruffydd beckoned to Anne, who hoisted her petticoats to her knee and scrambled down the hall, almost bowling over Bet and her jugs of ale. 

Gruffydd called for the attention of the room, and failing to obtain it looked over at Tom, who deployed a parade-ground roar very much to his own satisfaction. Gruffydd announced the theme of the mummery, and a good deal more besides about the King’s father as a mirror for royalty, the nonpareil of warriors and the flower of Christian manhood, in which attributes his son was set fair to follow him, and the assert the ancient rights of the English crown over fair France in perpetuity— 

A low but resonant man’s voice—Tom could narrow it down to probables, but not with certitude or justice identify it—interposed, ‘Get on with it, Taff, we haven’t got all day—’ 

‘—as the Queen Dowager said to the major-domo—’ shrieked Agnes Littleprud, to a ripple of merriment. Seeing the danger in this line of repartee, Tom glanced at his wife, but Gruffydd had it jovially if laboriously in hand, with a reflection upon Welsh tolerance of bastardy. 

‘—indeed, not infrequently such have been the fathers and mothers of princes—’ 

Tom caught Gruffydd’s eye and made a wool-gathering motion. ‘And so, in commemoration, celebration and observance of the crowning of Henry, the sixth of that name, _Dei Gratia Rex Angliae et Franciae et Dominus Hiberniae_ , we, his loyal subjects, offer this pageant, play or tableau vivant, which is to say in the language of his newly secured realm a living picture, of the Nine Worthies, three virtuous pagans, three Jews surpassing in honour and the three noblest of Christendom, and three, er, females of the sex—’ 

‘Four threes is a dozen,’ remarked Joan Miller, undeniably. 

‘Someone should tell your husband that,’ Margery Hakchees countered: theirs was an old and obscure feud. 

Gruffydd looked vexed. ‘Let your women keep silence, look you—’ 

‘I’d like to see you try it,’ the fat cheesemaker snorted. 

‘He wouldn’t know where to start,’ said the miller, suspending an enmity of three generations’ standing. ‘Gawping up the back passage when the goodwife’s got her chops flapping out front—’ 

Gruffydd’s face fell into the neutrality that Tom recognised as more dangerous than any snarl or sneer, for it wasted no energy upon impressing the foe. But no intervention proved necessary: the mood of the room underwent one of those ineffable shifts, both instantaneous and almost leisurely: for civilians to impugn the manhood of one who had fought to win France for the English crown, who had been brother-in-arms to a king upon a desperate field in Picardy some fifteen years before, was generally felt to be poor form. There were murmurs, even the servants paused briefly in their offices, then peace, and the show went on. 

Tom would remember the day of the Nine (or Dozen) Worthies for the rest of his life. Not for Gruffydd’s verses, which leaned heavily on the fortuitous rhymes of ‘hyght’, ‘wight’ and ‘knyght’, nor for the lisped addendum to the legend of Penthesilea, in which a vengeful dragon substantially altered the accepted narrative of the Matter of Troy. Not for Hector, who at the sight of forty expectant faces turned the colour of limewash and vomited, nor for Semiramis, who ignored the stiff speech Gruffydd had composed (rhyming ‘dove’ and ‘above’ quite a bit) and brought the house down with improvised coquetry. Not for Judas Maccabeus, whose carefully-phrased distinction of himself from another of the same forename was lost in a hail of jeers, rinds and crusts (he parried the latter rather more gracefully than would most ten-year-olds, behind his shield of laths and cloth, decorated with a hammer), nor for Tomarys, who substituted most of her forgotten lines with invective against those supposedly responsible for driving her late husband to an early grave, but waved the painted bladder-on-a-stick meant for the head of Cyrus with such gusto that everyone enjoyed themselves anyway. The Christian Worthies he saw not at all, because Adam came to his shoulder and said, ‘Sir Hugh is at the gate, sir, says he will not come in.’ 

Tom glanced at Nan, who having relinquished Griff to the nursemaid, was dozing with her elbow on the arm of the chair and head in her hand. Inexplicably reluctant to wake her, though he supposed she might like to see Hugh also, he let her be. 

The rain had become a dense freezing mist; disoriented by wine and warmth, Tom heard Hugh’s palfrey stamp and snicker before he identified which of the looming shadows he was. 

‘Christ’s bones, Hugh, come in for a drink.’ 

Hugh tutted reflexively at the oath. ‘No, I can’t stop. I’m expected at Temple Ewell by nightfall.’ 

‘Mind how you go. There are some ruffians about on the Downs, even these days.’ 

‘I trust in God. And the Prior’s servants.’ 

Tom peered into the murk, perceiving two burly mounted shapes halted at a discreet distance. 

‘What’re you calling for, then?’ It came out rougher than he had meant. Hugh was a dutiful son. 

‘It’s on my way. But—I heard today of the death of Sir Thomas Erpingham. I thought you might like to know.’ 

Tom felt sobered and cold. ‘Yes.’ 

Hugh made the sign of the cross. ‘ _Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat ei. Requiescat in pace. Amen._ ’ 

‘Amen,’ Tom said, crossing himself. ‘I—he wasn’t far short of three score at Agincourt. It shouldn’t be any surprise, but—’ 

‘Yes,’ Hugh said, his voice warm with unexpected sympathy. Of course, Hugh's daily dealings involved their fair share of old men. Some of them he must be fond of, and then they died. ‘It always is, even when it isn’t.’ 

Tom patted the palfrey’s neck. ‘You’d better get on. Thank you. It was good of you to think of—me.’ 

‘I do quite often, you know. Goodbye, Father.’ He turned his mount, ambling back towards his attendants. 

'All right, son.' Tom's voice sounded both too loud and oddly muffled, an effect of the fog, no doubt. 

When he got back to the hall the servants were clearing the tables for the dancing, Cecily directing operations with a booming, insufferable verve which Tom suddenly saw from the outside as his own. 

‘Where’s your mother?’ 

‘In the solar. She was feeling ill.’ 

He looked around for Gruffydd, but couldn’t see him. No-one he could see was anyone he wanted to talk to, but on the way to the western end of the house he was waylaid, it seemed, by almost all of them. 

Dusk was gathering, and the solar, its windows shuttered tight against the drear evening, was lit only by a single branch of candles: they, and the fire that old Malkin was patiently drawing, made a roundel of rich golden light in which Nan sat upon a low stool. Her gown of siskin taffeta, which Tom had thought unbecomingly bilious in daylight, was rucked about her like a cool mossy bank in May. She had unpinned her goffered veil, showing the linen bands securing her hair, in which the firelight brought out the chestnut in those few strands that were still brown rather than grey. She rubbed her temples with her thumbs, as if her head ached, and at his entrance, which brought some of the noise of the party into her dim sanctuary, looked up, her face sagging and hollow with fatigue. _Magnificat anima mea Dominum_ , he thought, and knew then what her tiredness and sickness meant. 

‘Gruffydd,’ she said, ‘Tom’s here.’ 

Tom jumped; his opening the door had indeed cast a further shadow on the spot where Gruffydd leaned against the wall, but he had not even sensed the presence of a fourth in the room. Old, fat and soft. 

Malkin hung up the bellows and dusted her hands on her apron. ‘Will there be anything else, ma’am?’ 

‘No, thank you.’ 

‘Bring us more of that malmsey,’ Tom said. ‘We have a health to drink.’ 

‘Yes, sir.’ She bobbed and departed. 

‘Thomas—’ Gruffydd lurched from the wall and reached for his crutch; Tom offered his arm in lieu of it but Gruffydd shook his head. 

Nan said, ‘He guessed my suspicions, Tom, that’s all. It’s very early on. I can’t be sure.’ 

Tom knelt down beside her in the rushes; she settled his head in her lap, pretending to admonish him for creasing her kirtle. 

‘Are you pleased?’ She stroked back his hair from his brow, in unthinking emphasis of the hairline’s retreat. At least he hadn’t a thin, tonsured-looking patch on his crown, or not much. 

‘Delighted. You know I always am. Just—well, look, never mind. You need to look after yourself.’ 

Gruffydd cleared his throat. ‘I had best be going back to the party, see—’ 

‘Don’t,’ Nan said. ‘Don’t leave us. Not now. Not all night.’ 

And he did not, because Gruffydd ap Llewelyn, very perfect in chivalry, look you, never once flouted a woman’s command.

**Author's Note:**

> Fic title: from _Love's Labour's Lost_ , V, ii.
> 
>  _Vae tibi terra cuius rex est puer_ —’: 'Woe to thee, O land, when thy king is a child...' (Ecclesiastes 10:16)
> 
>  _omnia tempus habent et suis spatiis transeunt universa sub caelo_ : 'To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven....' (Ecclesiastes 3:1)
> 
> ‘—as the Queen Dowager said to the major-domo—’: refers to the relationship of Katharine of Valois and Owain Tudor.
> 
> I have given Sir Thomas Erpingham (d.1428) an extra year or so of life. I think it's the sort of thing Shakespeare would approve of.
> 
>  _Magnificat anima mea Dominum_ : 'My soul magnifies the Lord...' (Luke 1:46)


End file.
